'Enchantment' Holds True To The Title

September 10, 1986|By Reviewed by Suzy Hagstrom of The Sentinel Staff

As Figures of Enchantment begins, the reader enters the world of a tired government bureaucrat in a crowded Latin American city. As the same novel ends -- with a description of a remote, wild island where man battles himself, a beast and the beast within -- the reader wonders whether chance or fate dominates existence.

Such is the magic writer Zulfikar Ghose creates in his new novel, Figures of Enchantment. Ghose' use of imagery and time are striking. Iguanas and pink flowers coexist on the island. The tired bureaucrat, Felipe Gamboa, counts the days until his second daughter, who is identical to his first, turns 16:

''Instantly arriving at . . . her sixteenth birthday, he lost a sense of his own age -- what was he, fifty, sixty? -- and felt ageless, with no expectation of mortality, but a remote sense of an unending future in which the days declined, sending the sun on one more voyage through the underworld, but there was no final termination of time, and human memory, escaping from the fires of cremation or leaping out of the interred skull, became a current in the atmosphere, a charged breath that must again be the fuel of human blood and human passion.''

The passage of time, vivid landscapes and human conditions that Ghose depicts reflect his own eclectic background. He was born in Pakistan, reared in India and educated in England. Married to a Brazilian artist, Ghose has traveled extensively in Latin America. He now lives in Austin, Texas.

Ghose's exposure to different cultures pervades Figures of Enchantment, making it an unusually rich novel. He skillfully presents the Eastern preoccupations with destiny and perceptions of reality beside the Latin American notions of dreams and the absurd.

To cope with his dull, meager existence, Gamboa imagines a zero at the end of his salary. He calculates how he would spend the extra money -- on a bigger apartment in a better neighborhood, on a fancy car, on an education for his daughter. He imagines the extra salary he would receive if he were promoted and his wife's surprised reaction.

The promotion never comes, and he continues to gaze at the magazine pictures pinned on the wall near his desk. The pictures are of the ocean, Pacific islands, a view of ''a brightness elsewhere.'' Oddly enough, by innocently eating his bag lunch in a park where a political protest is staged and by being arrested, Gamboa reaches that brightness elsewhere.

Whether he arrives there by accident or by some divine plan is a question that haunts the reader throughout the novel.

Another character, Federico Chagra, buys an amulet that changes his life. Because he believes the amulet holds the power to fulfill his wishes, Chagra believes that the small events and coincidences in his life are destiny. ''He resolved to remain prudent and not to make wishes extravagantly or indiscriminately for fear that thoughtless excess might lead to his losing the power; and he feared, too, that there might be some horrible price to pay at the end, a pain to suffer for each granted wish.''

As Ghose unfolds the characters' lives and dreams, the reader is coaxed into contemplating his own daily existence and purpose. Employing a fascinating plot and powerful language, the novel explores some timeless themes and provokes a precious byproduct -- self-reflection within the reader. Figures of Enchantment is nothing less than enchanting.